Really Strategies Blog

Content management for publishers---staying ahead of the digital revolution

The Gilbane Group's "Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" illustrates some projections for e-book revenue over the next 5 years.When asked about the percentage of gross revenue that e-book activities generated at their company, survey respondents indicated that the majority of book publishers see less than 5% of gross revenues from e-books. In contrast, expected revenue from e-book efforts in 5 years’ time runs high, with the majority of book publishers expecting 15% or higher of gross revenues to come from e-books:

  

Do you have a plan to stay ahead of the digital revolution?

 Download your free copy of this report today > click here.

http://gilbane.com/

The Kindle revenue bump

Good news for publishers delivering to Kindle---in December, Amazon will increase the revenue split so that publishers can earn 70 percent of the retail price for each issue sold in the Kindle Store, minus delivery costs. That’s a reversal from Amazon keeping as much as 70 percent of retail revenues.

Read the full story here.

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation | a report from the Gilbane Group

Over the next few weeks, we're sharing snippets from "A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" by the Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc. The report truly is a must-read for book publishers but other types of publishers will also gain value from the trends and research the study has collected.

Today, we share the overview from the report:

It truly is a whole new world for book publishing. Publishers know this of course, as do their partners, vendors, and, of course, their booksellers. There are the obvious signs – the Kindles you see in friends’ hands and on the subway and the lines at the Apple store when the iPad was introduced. For industry observers, there are also the daily headlines about Google, Sony, Apple, and Amazon. PW Daily, the Monday-Friday e-mail blast from Publishers Weekly has e-book-related articles in almost every edition; we have counted more than one edition in the past year where every article was about e-books.

After the devastating economy of late 2008 and early 2009, book publishers are seeing more numbers that are positive. The revenues for digital publishing – and e-books specifically – are very strong and promise to continue to grow. Some segments of book publishing, including STM (scientific, technical, and medical) and professional, reached the digital revenue tipping point long ago. Some research from our Outsell colleagues, summarized later in this report, suggest other segments will start to tip in the next year or two.

These larger forces are creating significant pressure inside of book publishing. The goal of this study was to look at how publishers are adapting their traditional processes – many decades old and older – to adapt to digital publishing. Since these processes are usually aided by technology, the study took aim at the tools and systems publishers have been using and are starting to use.
The excitement of the marketplace is tempered by some of our analysis. While there are many bright spots – production and digital printing jump to mind – other process areas lag, are too nascent, or are waiting for industry standards and best practices to coalesce. What makes the landscape particularly challenging for book publishers is the rapid-fire addition of new channels and business models and the need to codify these models in their internal processes and systems even before they can fully evaluate how valuable some of these channels and models are.

Still the big picture for book publishers is very positive. The revenues are there, and growing. Readers are excited by the new devices and are demonstrating their excitement in fast-growing device and e-book sales. Publishers are moving ahead quickly across a broad front of process improvement and technology investment.

Our case studies point to some of the smartest bets publishers can make in the near- and medium-term. We expect that a look at these process areas in another year would show steady improvement in most areas and marked improvement in those areas tied most directly to revenue growth and e-book promotion.

Stay tuned for more information from this report or download your own copy here.

RSuite User Conference: How is Google Editions going to impact your publishing organization?

The Google Books Partner Program and Google Editions is growing and evolving at an astounding rate. Come hear keynote speaker Andrew Littell, strategic partner development manager for Google, share his insights and vision of Google Books Partner Program and Google Editions. He'll detail what publishers need to understand now and plan for the future.

Come join over 100 publishing executives at the RSuite CMS User Conference on October 20, 2010 in Philadelphia to hear more RSuite success stories and network with industry leaders - http://www.rsuitecms.com/2010userconf.htm

The Oxford University Press Licenses RSuite

  We are delighted to add the Oxford University Press to the RSuite customer list.

Oxford University Press (OUP) is using RSuite to transform its publishing operations. RSuite offers OUP the tools and the facility to automatically ingest and store content from its authors and other content suppliers. RSuite also allows the delivery of OUP content both manually and automatically to multiple targets in various formats. Examples of content delivery range from XML documents that are converted to Word and sent via email for editorial updates to batch delivery of XML and media files based on user selection and other criteria for web site updates.

[Full press release here.]

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation

The Gilbane Group's web-based survey of book publishing professionals has just gone live.

The survey is one of the research mechanisms for Gilbane's upcoming study: A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing.

The survey takes about 10-to-15 minutes to complete and seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers.

All participants will have full access to the full-length study, which will be published in June.

This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals.

Flippin' the pay-per-page paradigm

DocZone's new licensing model offers publishers an innovative approach to content management.  Publishers receive full system capabilities for a group of editorial and production users, with access to all system features and only pay for final pages produced.

This means the cost of the system is carried by the current production budget. You pay for the pages you make, the FINAL pages you make:

• not for corrections or for corrected pages of any kind
• NO author alterations charges
• NO corrected pages charges

The entire automated publishing system, authoring tool, Content Management System, and pagination is paid for by composition charges alone. We figure, publishers pay for the pages anyway so why not get a free authoring/editing tool, a free CMS and output to PDF, EPUB , HTML and RTF all for the price of composition?

DocZone's flagship customer, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group said,

"We saw tremendous opportunities for cost savings and improved turnaround time with DocZone. In our pilot testing with DocZone, we saw the time for PDF proofs drop from a week to just a few minutes. With the same amount of money as we have traditionally budgeted just for offshore composition services, we now have a complete content management and automated publishing environment."

Read more at Publishers Weekly.

See pay-per-page live by contacting us.

[Official press release here.]

Three Webinars Publishers Should Attend

We are excited to announce the Really Strategies' Wednesday Webinar Series....

How to Make the Business Case for a CMS in Your Organization
February 17, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
Publishers understand that content management is a pivotal piece in today's publishing environment. Yet budgeting for a CMS initiative can quickly scale to the point where executives question why they should stray from the status quo. In this free webinar, Barry Bealer, CEO of Really Strategies, will lead a panel of publishing professionals who will discuss how they made their business case and got executive buy-in for content management in their organizations.

Panelists include

• Anthony Barrera, Head of Internal Systems Development, Nature Publishing Group
• Allison Risko, VP, Learning Services, Kaplan EduNeering
• Mark Hoeber, Documentation Manager, Unica Corporation

>> Click here to register

DITA for Publishers: How Publishers Can Really Do XML
March 10, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information. Publishers are starting to take DITA seriously. And if they aren’t, they should be. This panel session will introduce DITA for publishers, the basic publishing-specific DITA components that are completely generic, and how DITA can really be the tool-set that launches publishers into the XML world.

In this free webinar DITA guru and contributor to the DITA specification, Eliot Kimber, senior solutions architect at Really Strategies, will present DITA for Publishers and provide details about his new community-based, open-source project: DITA For Publishers (dita4publishers.sourceforge.net).
>> Click here to register

How RSuite Helped The MIT Press Transform Its Publishing Operation
April 7, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
The MIT Press publishes approximately 200 new books a year and over 40 journals. MIT Press has a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science, as well as a long-term commitment to both design excellence and the efficient and creative use of new technologies. To maximize content re-use and to overhaul its entire publishing division, the MIT Press outlined a CMS strategy to lead its books and journals division into the new decade. RSuite along with complementary technologies were selected as the solution at MIT Press.
>> Click here to register

Waiting in [the virtual] line for your eBook

Simon and Schuster and Hachette recently announced that their eBook offering will only be available after the hardcover book has been on the market but prior to the paperback hitting book stores.  The Wall Street Journal reported on this recently and the article can be found here.

Once again we have a business model that is in direct conflict with what the consumer wants. Do you remember not all that long ago the issues in the music industry around buying a single song versus an entire album on-line?  This smells suspiciously similar and the consumer is the one losing out.

I completely understand the challenges publishers face regarding the price disparity between hardcover and electronic formats, but postponing the inevitable is not a customer focused organization.  Why not embrace the new business model and become the best eBook publisher?  That is easier said than done when an entire industry is setup for publishing and distribution of a physical book.

It remains to be seen the next step in this business model, but for now, get in the virtual line and wait your turn to purchase that eBook.

Liber Novus

The Red Book by Carl Gustav Jung

W.W. Norton just published this legendary text in late October and what an endeavor it was.

Check out the prepress work involved with this publication by clicking here.